Tag: film

This is one of my occasional “grab bag” or “miscellany” posts, simply sharing sites and images I have come across and tagged for one reason or another.

• Films for Action (http://www.filmsforaction.org) is a site which documents activist movies, much more methodically than I did in my Greenie Moviesposts last year. The page which first caught my attention is their wall of films (above) but they have some interesting articles as well (I particularly liked their overview of worldwide moves towards reducing wage inequality) and a useful list of “independent media” in a sidebar on the article index page.

• These hyper-stylised Renaissance-inspired insect drawings might hardly rate a mention after the calendar but they do do something with insect forms that I have never seen before, and I do like anything that encourages a positive attitude towards insects and, in fact, the whole biosphere in which we are so intricately embedded.

• Finally I will share a Facebook page. I can hardly believe I’m doing this – I dismissed FB entirely for years as a waste of time and bandwidth, a horrible fad which pandered to lowest-common-denominator narcissism, a time-sink … and it is still, in fact, all of those if we allow it to be. On the other hand, it has become a useful means of spreading independent news and generating grass-roots crowd energy; and it has spawned its own visual language which, as I said in earlierposts, is sometimes beautiful and often fun. Trust Me, I’m an “Eco-designer”https://www.facebook.com/GreenSetGo enjoys the possibilities to the full. Reading the “About” info reveals the FB page is run by a real eco-design business … and there is nothing wrong with that, either.

This list of green movies – movies with environmental themes – is a spin-off from an article about fiction with environmental themes, Green and Good, which I wrote for Viewpoint on books for young adults earlier this year (Vol 20, Nr 2, Winter 2012).

The movies I found fall neatly into four groups: drama/entertainment, activist documentaries, nature documentaries and (for want of a better term) inspirational ‘art’ documentaries. This post covers the first two categories; the others are here.
I haven’t said much about any of the movies but have linked to their pages on two great movie review sites, Rotten Tomatoes (RT) and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).

Drama

Silent Running 1972 (RT) (IMDb) Saving the last of Earth’s plants in an interplanetary ark.

Dune 1984 (RT) (IMDb) Ecology was a central theme of Dune in its original conception, the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert, although it was less important to most of the rest of the series and nearly invisible in the movie, TV series and computer games spawned from it. Wikipedia/Dune franchise provides the best way to navigate the maze of Dune books, movies and games. Star Wars, incidentally, took a lot of ideas from Dune (without admitting to doing so) but the ‘green’ elements were lost in transit.

The Day after Tomorrow 2004 (RT) (IMDb) is a very bad movie and one that got its science ludicrously wrong, but it has to be included here because of its catastrophic-climate-change plot.

Avatar 2009 (RT) (IMDb) borrowed heavily from some very good old SF books (without admitting to it) and dumbed them down in the process but the visual effects are great and its heart is still in roughly the right place.

Activist Documentaries

Gasland 2010 (RT) (IMDb) Fracking for CSG in the USA. One of the scariest nonfiction movies I have ever seen, and should be compulsory viewing in CSG exploration areas in Australia.

Who Killed the Electric Car 2006 (IMDb) (RT) General Motors’ sleek EV1 (the electric car whose demise it laments) now looks more like a false start than a unique opportunity lost, but there are several lessons to be learned from the movie.

Bag It 2010 (IMDb) The perils of plastic. Entertaining and instructive.

The Cove 2008 (IMDb) (RT) Dolphin slaughter in Japan; confrontational on the ground and in the viewing.

The Hungry Tide 2011 (home page) Sea-level rise and its effects on low-lying Pacific islands as seen through the eyes of residents. I wrote about it at greater length here.

More please: please send me your suggestions and I will add them to the list.

Insects of Townsville

Many of my older posts link to Graeme Cocks’ excellent “Insects of Townsville.” Late in 2016 it moved to http://kooka.info/orders.html. The new site is still incomplete but is your best hope of finding the information or photo.